Month: February 2018

The knock against Seneca, even in his own time, was that he was a hypocrite. For a Stoic, he was obscenely rich. For a philosopher, he was uncomfortably close to the center of power and guilty of all the compromises such a position entails. Seneca was aware of this contradiction too. He even wrote about it. “Why …

There’s an enormous difference between being a story writer and being a regular person. As a person, it’s your duty to stay on a straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But as a …

World-building is extremely important in three categories of fiction: science fiction fantasy historical fiction It can also be important in other categories, but world-building is most strongly associated with the above. Going Deep or Going Wide World-building is a large topic with many aspects. We’ll focus on people groups, but keep in mind that it’s not the …

It’s remarkable how much your life can change when you add one new skill to your arsenal. Many years ago, I was working on a project at my day job and I needed to deal with a number of tables of data. Messy data that needed a fair bit of cleaning up to be useful. Too …

Throughout his bestselling book, Principles, Ray Dalio, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, sounds very much like a Stoic without knowingly stating it. As he writes in one passage, he learned to see pain as a teacher—it almost became a game to him to figure out the hidden lessons in each painful …

1) Liberals care much more about policies that make them feel good about themselves than they do about policies that actually make life better for people. 2) That person in politics being compared to Hitler is really not very much like Hitler at all. 3) The bigger government gets, the worse it serves the people. …

The USA is not magic dirt. Nations are people. If you want to live like Haiti, bring in Haitians. They won’t become Americans, they’ll just make America more like Haiti. Which, if you are honest with yourself, is exactly what all the Germans did too. If you were granted the magical ability to decide America’s …

People who can remember the 1980s know that there’s such a thing as a world without an internet, and it’s possible to have an economy that runs on paper, not electrons. That’s a very different economy than the one we have now. A lot of the jobs people have today didn’t exist in 1980. If …

If you’re serious about getting things done in your life, then you need to have a regular weekly habit of reviewing the previous week and planning the next one. That sounds fun, doesn’t it? It’s right up there with changing the oil and cleaning the toilet on most people’s list of Things To Avoid Doing Pretty …

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It’s my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be …